Bad Machine
by flesh and bone telephone
Summary: "Tell me, when you loved, was your love selfish, was it brutal? Or are those the traits that have always been with you and love, like a digger, brought them out? Love is your disease?" "I'm not ruled by my emotions, not the way Niklaus is." "Then," she smiles "He's not the dangerous one." — It won't be long. Like Troy, she'll fall. Elijah, Caroline, Klaus. Historical, Vampire AU.


**disclaimer:** i don't own nothing on television. it's truly a tragedy.  
**dedication:** for hannah for being a wonderful supporter of all my crackship feels and for ishi, who finally gave me the courage to write something that had dry-humping in it. stellar gals, really.  
**warning:** un-betad, irregular updates. historical AU but NOT AH.  
**even moar notes:** Okay, nothing. Read basic plot summary.

**SUMMARY:** LOLOL UH I SUKC AT SUMMAREES, READ AND REVEIW KAY? Klaus kills Katerina early into the 15th century, Elijah nearly revolts. It is the worst thing he expected. Niklaus has killed the one thing he loved, and even the nobleness of his character can be corrupted with rage. Elijah bides his time. A century later a Venetian vampire has captured the fancy of his brother; Revenge seems natural, it seems right. Will Elijah act? Pairings: Previous Kalijah, continuous Carolijah and Klaroline and basically triangle Klarolijah.

I don't know man, just go with it. Shhh, come on, let it happen. It makes more sense as a story written than it does in a summary.

* * *

She looks like she's sleeping. Dropped on the floor like a doll, her limbs splayed with a soft gentleness he hasn't seen in her for years, her hair in wild black curls, her lashes swept over bloodless cheeks. Porcelain and spider lace.

Elijah moves quietly, steps about the room in a mist of horrifying calm, as if observing her from a slightly different perspective from within the room would make her any less of a corpse. That something might be deducted, ruminated on, solution found and wrongness reversed, if only he were to be quiet, and calm, and think.

Neither of them make a sound.

Elijah was supposed to be thinking about the door he'd found ajar, about the pieces of broken vase, the hints of a struggle, but like a traitor his mind bends in on itself, swallows its own head in an impossible cycle of numbening numbening misapprehension.

He's dreamt of her like this, morbidly beautiful. The sweep of her dress reddening stealthily as the blood pools beneath her. The heart had been torn from her back, and he knows f he turned her over he'd see the wound. Elijah doesn't turn her over. He doesn't touch her. His insides feel terribly still, slower somehow, inefficiently slow. Elijah stands in the room, near the doorway, stands like a stranger, an interloper, a vampire waiting stupidly to be invited in.

It's not the blood that catches his attention so much as the delicate arch of Katerina's ankle, pale and white, a dancer's light foot. She reminds him of a heron he once saw, body crushed between the reeds of bamboo in a riverbank in Kyoto. The night, he remembers, when in the black water had risen fast and merciless, and in the morning when it was sated, when it had fallen away again only the heron had remained, grey and crumpled, wingspan twisted, feathers glistening wet pink.

Before she began to enjoy spitting at him she used to dance around him on those feet, spinning in circles, laughing in his face.

And he'd reach quietly, fingers grasping at the fringes of her and then grasping at air, breathing the soft fluttering spaces she'd escaped.

Katerina, mouth gasping, grabbing at him because he was too polite to touch her truly, too careful to ever dare rest his palm on her waist, to splay his fingers against her ribs and hiss the way she wanted him to. All men fell so easily under her; Elijah was just prolonging the inevitable, controlling his descent even in his steady demise. She once pushed him into the floor of a hayloft in Tushkent, climbing ontop of him like a drowning cat, and he'd had to grab at her hips when they rolled hard into his. Katerina, all claws and merciless knowing, "You don't love me," She hissed against his lips, the words felt like furnace fire, raw and brewing with hatred. "You never loved me, you chose _him_."

He hadn't denied it then, the accusation struck him, and the shame, the regret immobilized him beneath her. _She's wrong_, he hadn't chosen Klaus, he chose both of them. If she had _listened_ to him she'd have lived, he'd planned it for weeks and weeks and _she hadn't listened to him._

"You killed them," Her thighs tightened around him in a torturous pull and he, ever cool, ever composed found himself scrabbling at the soft curves of her waist. "You let him murder them."

"I didn't know." Elijah said, gritting it between his teeth like a curse, all composure lost under the brittle anger. She'd been too proud for him to manage, and so had he. "I didn't know."

Katherine laughed, her hair rolled over his chest, she tsked against his throat, her nails rent his waistcoat into ribbons, and then pressed their wicked points into his flesh. "You thought you loved me, you wanted to fuck me. Just like everyone else underneath that high and mighty noble performance. You want to fuck me now, too."

He had grimaced, a pained pull of a snarl, he didn't deny it and she laughed, a sound that rumbles through him in a morbid ripple. She rolled her hips again, jarred violently, wanton against him and her laughter soared, malicious that his hands on her hips didn't move to stop her, just sitting around her. Laughing at the way he always _lies._ "You're a coward, you don't have the guts to take me back to him, you don't have the stomach to kill me, and here you are, again and again, tugging at me, following the hem of my dress across the world. You know, a lifetime ago I might have loved you for it. I'd have thought it was deathless devotion, but then I was stupid. I had thought I'd found family with you, before I knew what you were. Gods among men. I wanted you to marry me, under a tree with a priest. I'd have said yes, you know. I look like her, though, and that's more your ruin than it is mine."

"Katerina –"

_Katherine_ pressed the flat of her tongue hot against his heart, and it was like salt on his wounds, it _burnt_. Elijah twisted his hands up her spine, into her hair, tugged, fingers lost in that flaming tangle, squeezing his eyes shut against the electric wave that rippled over his blood. "I'm just like you, too," she gasped, scratching idly down his chest, tenderly, a cat trying its claws. "I don't believe in love, there's no such thing, is there? You've been banished; you're supposed to bring me back. Klaus's little errand boy."

"I can't," Elijah pressed, miserable and _furious_, "I can't go back."

"Not without me. You've been tossed out of Paradise, just like me."

He remembers then, shuttered now in this doorway like an interloper, remembers how he crushed his groan, crushed the urge to pin her to the ground the way he shouldn't. He wasn't sure he could stop himself if he did. His restraint isn't infallible, Elijah knew himself too well to risk it then, to give her what she had always wanted.

"You'll never catch me," she said, and her hips jerk, and she's breathless, "I'll never be yours."

Elijah's fingers pressed against her scalp, scalding. "There are others looking for you, he'll catch you, he'll kill you."

"If you catch me, he'll kill me."

"I've begged for your life –"

"It doesn't matter." She said, keening her spine back, wincing but triumphant of his hands in her hair. "I'm not his, what makes you think I'd ever want to be yours?"

Tashkent, Sovibo , Constantinople – she is dead now, in Petersburg. He thinks he should have pressed her into the ground the way he shouldn't, he should have pressed his tongue against the drum beat at the hollow of her throat, should have admired the dirty glint of gold in her hair when the straw got tangled into it. He should have let her had her way in that hayloft in Tashkent.

He should have loved her.

Elijah sinks to his knees, a loosening behind his ribs, unfurling suddenly, a hideous know come undone. When he scoops her up, her skin is cold as frostbite, unfeeling stone, he scoops her delicately the way he might a doll. The way he might have done when he was a boy, scooping up dead sparrows when winter was cruelest, afraid they'd come apart in his hands if he wasn't gentle enough.

There is a dagger he has hidden in the deepest recesses of him, and though his hands are gentle, tempered with dangerous grief, quiet in loss – his thoughts are clear, they are murderous, and will be decidedly more dangerous.

* * *

Klaus didn't promise anyone anything. Promises are especially binding, Elijah knows, Klaus never gave his word.

Klaus doesn't ask where she is buried, only watches the flames in the hearth in one of his dark, raging episodes of self-reflection. Elijah is tired of it, he has suffered it enough. Elijah has stood by, for years, silent sentinel, an assisting tool for the great storyline of Klaus, a character worthier of a story, worthier of great salvation and great damnation both.

It is the deep of the night when Elijah returns to his brother. Katerina was right. He was a dog, wasn't he? All bark, no bite. Summoned and bid wherever Niklaus desired him to be, did whatever was asked for him to do. _Loyal_, she had said dryly, and the word itself had sounded like some weakness of character. Better be a cripple, it seemed to suggest.

The maids have been dismissed. In his sister's glaring absence his family had not been as gentle with them; they were frightened, only few had remained, most of them compelled to stay, the others had formed...attachments. Niklaus drained whichever was closest dry, every dinner time. He was indiscriminate like that.

The lavender of their cheap soap still hung in the hallway. The candles were melting to their stubs. Niklaus was never one for even the most menial house-keeping, he was too self-absorbed to care about such things. Rebekah would have bought new candles. Rebekah would have made the maids put flowers in the vases, she would have hidden the acid burn on the plaster in the lobby with a bear throw, but she hasn't.

Elijah re-enters Niklaus's orbit, it is a lonely place.

The dagger lies on the table, the tip dusted in ash. Klaus had put it there with precise intention, with an openness that is uncharacteristic of him. It looks like an ultimatum, both prize and punishment, the sort which are hanged over negotiation proceedings.

The dagger has always been hidden, always comes stealthy and quiet, but here it is, in plain view.

It might be that his brother is sorry, but Elijah's face is stiff, cold in his own form of cultured hostility.

Elijah wonders where his welcome is, after fifty years of being away.

They both know what the other has done.

Elijah asks where Rebekah is.

Klaus continues staring into the flames, his silence answer enough.

All the parts of him that have accommodated this behavior, bent for his brother's selfishness, made flexible from years of guilty self-loathing on his personal failings as an older brother, a part that was meant to be reserved for human selfishness Elijah had allowed to be beaten into supple obedience from an enduring prioritization of family and duty – all these parts, these pigments of him, the details of an old machine, soldiering forward, enduring - they _snap._

Klaus is surprised to be torn from the mantle, to have Elijah's hand lunge at his throat and squeeze.

Klaus's surprise is short lived, and he reacts too. Twists, snarls, Elijah's arm breaks at the joint, like tinder.

Elijah's grip doesn't loosen, and Klaus is enraged (he always wears it, in the wild of his eyes, on the skin of his teeth, murderous brawling) and Klaus laughs and _everyone is always laughing at him._ "Where," Elijah asks calmly, patience fraying, his whole body itching for violence. "Is our sister?"

"You're blinded by sentiment, and it's catching – can't make her throwing up a fuss for you, Elijah. I want to deal with your treason without her crying."

Elijah regards his brother, the rictus grin, the bitter vitriol in mad blue eyes. Always an accusation, always probing Elijah and where he has failed them, all of them. The arch of Katerina's ankle, dead sparrows, and a millennium of acquiesce simmers beneath his skin like a quiet, quiet flame, and it feeds him, warm and strong. Elijah's look is steady, collected, and he blinks once, stone-cold all over again. "Where is Rebekah, Niklaus?"

Klaus rolls his eyes. The fissures in Elijah's arm dissolve, and the bone fragments slip back together with a liquid-ease that is insufferable even to his own ears. In light of this the sound his brother's skull makes when Elijah slams it against the wall should be enough to satisfy him but Elijah isn't satisfied, he has never asked for anything – he has never been _allowed_ to want – Elijah's mouth is a hard line, his hand is an iron claw, set ready to smite his brother's brains open the way their father would have. Klaus is pure insolence, and Elijah had always been afraid of seeming like Mikael, had always been careful not to be violent – but he is violence this night, and he does not think he will be anything else for a long while. Elijah moves to strike him against the mantle again but Klaus weasels his way out, wrangles out of his grip because the bloody fucking vermin has practice - he's out of Elijah's grip and snatching up the dagger before Elijah can even turn around.

Elijah watches him, disgust apparent. Klaus hasn't stuck the dagger in yet. He's playing around. "You've been following her all over Europe, and doing nothing else. I told you I wanted her dead."

Elijah turns smartly on his feet, his hand falls lightly into his pocket. Looking as innocuous as he is in the daylight. A man of repute, too removed to be human, too dignified to be a God. He raises a brow, the blood still white-hot in his veins, his violence controlled, "And now she is." He says, clipped and curt. "What more do you want, Niklaus?"

"You weren't going to do it, I relied on Kol in this instance."

Kol's malice, Kol's mocking smile, Kol's teasing fingers, how he liked to bend his meal's spines till they gave. His fingers long and slender, pointed and elegant, light and playful as a pianists. How precise and cruel. Elijah's throat felt ashy, and when he spoke he felt his words might have been smoke for all they would change anything. "You're a stupid, petty child, and I will never forgive you."

"Oh, don't be so grave," Klaus says, his shoulders hunched in on himself, defensive. The ire flares in him, the dagger gleams, but he does not move, will not move. "What of the ill done to me? I charged you with a task and you failed me, you owed it to me –"

"I owed you nothing!" Elijah roared, Klaus stepped back as if struck. "You knew of my feelings for her. Her death served no purpose except to satisfy your petty grudge, and to ridicule me. I am your brother, and you have done me no kindness in this, nor in anything. _I have never betrayed you._" Elijah did not move from the fireplace, his words shook the very air, he thought he might burst, that he might implode and disappear. All his anguished longing and grief pressured in him, beaten out into a white hot star. It ate him. "I am not your slave, Niklaus. Always and forever was a promise we made to each other. It was not your servants swearing allegiance to you, it was us, your siblings, promising to love you, to protect you, and you gave us no such courtesy in return. We have lived for you, killed for you, and you have selfishly denied us any happiness, you have allowed yourself to believe that we are dismissible, that we are tools. And I will have no more of it."

"Is that what it comes to, then?" Klaus says, "Do you want revenge? Over some _whore_?"

"…I dare you."

Klaus straightened up suddenly, he could not hide the quivering of his mouth. "What?"

"I dare you, Niklaus to put the dagger between my ribs. To put me in the box, to go wherever you will, while you keep me asleep for a hundred years, a thousand years. I will remember what has been done to me this night, forever. You don't know what being in the coffin is like, do you? You're not asleep. Not really. I tell you now, that the moment you act, you put me down I will go those years thinking of today, and I will wake up, inevitably, I will wake. I will never forgive. You put the dagger in me, and no army in heaven or hell will keep me from you."

"I am your brother." Niklaus's voice shook, his eyes shining, reeling with emotion. "I am your brother, you can't hate me."

"I fear if you continue this way that I will."

"Then what do you want?"

_Release me,_ it came unbidden to him and he could see the mad look of fright in Klaus's face, the blue whirlwind of panic, expecting this very same request. The worst wish of all, and one he would not grant. Klaus would never. _Free me?_ But then, what would he do then? Who would watch them, then? That would be a betrayal, he was furious with them, but he could not betray Niklaus, he could not leave his stupid, fickle siblings unfettered. He had to remain. Oversee. He had never planned on loving her, so he didn't lose the opportunity to love her, he was never going to love her. He had lost the old madness, he had nothing to want anymore, except that he hated Niklaus and did not dare admit it to anyone in the room. He did not think he could forgive.

"I am your brother." Klaus repeated, tears trembling in his gaze, wounded – still so much a child, Elijah wanted to crumble, to weep, he couldn't. He only had to endure the way he had for so long.

All his malice forgotten, Niklaus staggered towards him and dropped the dagger like it burnt him when he thought Elijah might flinch. Elijah did flinch, shocked to his marrow for his brother looked the way he had a thousand years ago. Hurt, gaping like a wound that would not close, looking only for some stray inkling of love, for scraps – telling them he'd killed Henrik, weeping like it was Henrik's blood on his hands, and no one would believe him and _I killed him. I love him, but I killed him, didn't I?_ And Elijah should have said _no_, the way he was too afraid to do, should have said "No, _never_," the way Rebekah had, with certainty. _No_, _you didn't kill him_. But Rebekah was in a box. Another doll. Niklaus had loved her and he put a dagger between her ribs too.

Niklaus walked toward him, heavy, ready to collapse. Elijah's insides lurched, he himself could barely stand, he could barely soldier it all, he could soldier this even less. His little brother looked lost, raving, a mad man washed up on the shore – lucid only in fear. He looked frightful. Niklaus's eyes searched him, his arms went around Elijah in an embrace that felt like iron, and it dragged him down. He stiffened, didn't loosen up to accept his brother. Niklaus was at fault, he'd made Elijah hate him, and how could Elijah forgive him if he was never going to be sorry? _I want to make him sorry,_ Elijah realized, even while he wanted to protect him, he wanted to exact upon him a level sort of vengeance. It was a strange riotous feeling, it unnerved him with its lack of rationality, it clouded him, it would _ruin_ him.

The delicate arch of an ankle, the humid sap of straw –

"Elijah," Niklaus kept on saying, Elijah cursed him, he cursed himself, he thought about leaping back with Niklaus's manacle embrace around him, tumbling them both into the fiery hearth, imagining, hoping it would end them both. Elijah never dawdled, he never imagined, he never wished, he was judicious, he was responsible, he was _tired_ - He raised his arms instead, returned the gesture; let his brother choke into his shirt, "I'm your _brother_."

_Yet you wield the knife so well._

* * *

**end note:** man, i am re-watching hannibal. mads mikkelsen, aw yeahh.


End file.
